Valgrim smiled again. “And the crow?” he prompted finally.
“That was the worse news. He told me there is a tyrant still living, though close to death today, Sigurth Ragnarsson.”
“Tyrant he may be,” said Valgrim. “Yet he is the favorite of Othin for all that. If the Way could win him to its side, it would gain a mighty champion.”
“That may be too,” said Vigleik. “Yet his creature the crow treats us as his enemies, the murderers of his brother. It threatened me, threatened all of us, with his vengeance. And yet the crow was not telling all the truth, I know. He was keeping something back.”
“What?”
Vigleik shook his head slowly. “That is still hidden from me. Yet for all you say, Valgrim, I do not think the road to victory at Ragnarök lies through the likes of Sigurth Ragnarsson, with his sacrifices and his cruelty. It is not great champions alone that will overcome Loki and the Fenris-brood. Nor is it blood that will bring Balder back from the dead. Not blood, but tears.”
Valgrim’s face flushed even in the cold at the challenge to his authority, and the mention of unlucky names and deeds. Controlling himself, he asked finally, “And at the end, when you seemed to look far away?”
“Then I saw eagles in the distance. First one mounted above the other, and then the lower one flew higher again. I could not see which would win in the end.”
Chapter Five
Erkenbert the deacon sat in the sunlight behind a stout table, ink and parchment in front of him. It had been a long day’s work, almost over now. But a deeply satisfying one. Erkenbert felt confidence, respect, almost awe creeping over him as he shuffled the thick pile of parchment sheets, filled with row after row of names: each one an application to join the ranks of the new Order which the archbishops of the West had proclaimed: the Order of the Lance, or in their tongue the Lanzenorden.
During their slow journey north from Cologne to Hamburg, Erkenbert had realized that there were special factors favoring the establishment of an order of warrior-monks here, in the German lands. In his native Northumbria, as indeed over the whole of family-conscious England, the thanes who formed the backbone of any army were good at one thing alone: establishing themselves comfortably on the estates granted them by the king. And then moving heaven and earth to see that not only did they hold on to them, however old, fat or unfitted for military service they became, but also that the estates were passed on in due form to their children. Sometimes they sent sons to perform service for them, sometimes they worked their way into royal or monastic favor by enforcing the king’s dooms, or the abbot’s, and witnessing any charter that needed a voice to swear one way or the other. However they did it, even if they had to send their daughters to tempt some magnate’s lust, it was rare in England to find a parcel of land without some noble’s son who thought he had a claim on it, or a noble’s son who would prove in the end to be disappointed.
Not so in Germany. The warrior-class there had not been allowed to settle in and make itself comfortable. Service had to be performed. If it was not, a better replacement was found immediately. A middle-aged warrior had better have seen to his own security by the time his sword-arm stiffened, for his lord would feel no obligation to do it for him. As for the sons of warriors, there were many with little prospects, no assured future. In a sense, thought Erkenbert very quietly to himself, for all their concern with noble blood, they were more like peasants or churls than nobles, for they might be dispossessed at any moment. To such men, warlike though they were, to be allowed to enroll in an Order which would provide them a home and comradeship till the day they died, as if they were black monks, might well have unexpected appeal.
Yet he and his colleagues would not have had so much success in recruiting their serf-soldiers if it had not been for the oratory of Archbishop Rimbert. A dozen times as they made their way north from Cologne to Hamburg, Erkenbert had heard him call together the masses in whichever town they had chosen for their halt, and had heard him preach.